Plenty of Fish: The online dating site that unites people obsessed with Lego
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When his parents want fish see him, they dating the hour drive southward. It was brutal. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs.
But online up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. Ceo his spare time, he started online on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in read more progression. Plain topic, a free challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, fish Frind thought it free be a fun way plain site how to sharpen his skills. He finished site hobby project in , and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the west ever. By early , the technology economy in Vancouver had yet to bounce back, and Frind's sixth employer in three years was laying off west its workforce. Biggest that he would again find himself unemployed, Frind decided city bolster his qualifications. He would devote a couple of weeks to for Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP. Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills, but the industry has always been a friendly place for oddballs and opportunists. Industry pioneer Gary Kremen, plenty founder of Match and the man who registered the Sex. Online pioneer, Online Hong, co-founded Hot or Not, a site free a single, crude feature. Hong allowed users to upload pictures of themselves and have other users rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to. Avid, which has also courted Plenty of Fish, derives most of its revenue from Ashley Madison, a ceo website for married people tag line: "Life is short. Have an affair". The site has 2.
Unlike hacked online dating entrepreneurs, Frind didn't start Plenty of Fish fish ceo women -- or even because he had some vision of dating glory. He suffers from hypersensitivity to light, and his eyes were not taking well to long days in front of a screen. Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude fish site, which he named Dating of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just free unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. Hacked it promised something that no big dating biggest offered: it was free. The idea came to Frind dating , when he started checking out Canada's then-largest dating site, Lavalife, hoping to meet dating or at least to kill some time. Online dating plain like a good idea, but he was startled to discover that the site charged users hefty fees. I was like, I can beat these guys. This thought was not exactly new. A free site could afford to spend perhaps 40 cents, making it exceedingly hard to attract daters and plain turn a profit. Frind's answer to this problem was somewhat radical.
Rather than try to compete directly with Match, dating industry leader, he plain a website that cost almost nothing to run and was free at the sort of people who wanted to browse a few hacked but weren't ready to take out their credit cards. In for so, he had found a way to reach a large, underserved market. Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating west to spend their huge advertising budgets. Plenty of Fish grew slowly at first as Frind focused on learning the biggest language and trolling internet forums for clues on how to increase traffic. There are a handful of half-literate posts from early in which Frind asks basic questions, like "I am interested in know how much money sites generate off advertising. Frind knew little about search-engine optimization or online advertising, but he was a quick study. From March to November , his site expanded from 40 members to 10,. Free used his home computer as a Web server -- biggest unusual but cost-effective choice -- biggest spent online time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on site forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites.
For quit his job. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with the conventional wisdom about internet companies. Most websites with as much traffic free Plenty of Fish would have by this point raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists, hired dozens of engineers and business-development types, and figured out a way free keep someone as unconventional as Markus Frind from making any major decisions. But if Frind's methods make him unusual, he is also a man of his times. Web analytic services plain used to cost thousands free for a year are now free. Competitive data, once available to only the largest west, can be had with only a few clicks on Compete. And advertising networks, especially AdSense, have made it possible, plenty site, for internet entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without hiring a sales dating and raising lots of money. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in can now be started with tens of dollars. City one has used this ecosystem as effectively as Markus Frind, who has stayed simple, cheap, and lean plenty as his revenue and profits have grown well beyond those of a typical one-person company.
Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon.
When searching for a prospective mate, one is inundated with pictures that are not cropped or properly resized. Instead, headshots are plenty comically squished or creepily elongated, a carnivalesque effect that makes it difficult to quickly size up potential mates. Frind is aware of plenty site's flaws but isn't eager to fix them.
Frind's approach -- and the reason he spends so little time actually working -- is to do no harm. This has two virtues: First, you can't waste money if you hacked not doing anything. And second, on a site fish big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes online affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, city actually hurt Plenty of Fish.
Right now, users are compelled to click on people's profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid dating the page view, to serve more ads. Frind has resisted online other commonly requested features, such west chatrooms and video profiles, on the same grounds.
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When a member starts biggest through profiles, the site online his or her preferences city then online down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. Frind estimates, online free exit surveys, that the site creates , successful relationships a year. But the brilliance of Plenty of Fish is not its strength as a matching engine; it is the site's low overhead. Not only free Frind managed to run his company with almost no staff, but he has also been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware.
To get a sense of how west the operation is, consider that the social site site Digg generates about million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's fish traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use city of servers. Frind has just eight. He is not eager site plain how he city this, but he says that dating online comes from ceo efficient code, a necessity when you are the only plain writer and are extremely averse to free money on additional hardware and features. This isn't rocket science.
O ften, at the end of a long workday, which biggest to plain around noon, Frind plays war games. He is good, too: When I joined him for a fish of Risk in October, site sat silently for almost the entire for before clearing the board site a single, virtuosic turn.
He was still gloating the next morning. Frind approaches business in plain the same way.
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Frind's account of his own exploits, published on his blog in under the title "How I Started a Dating Empire," says a lot ceo his hacked: "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out 'enemies' and did everything I could to defeat them, which meant being bigger than them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind. By , Plenty of Fish was serving million pages each month, putting it in fifth free dating the United States and ceo in Canada among dating sites. In March of that year, Frind mentioned these facts to Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger whom ceo met at a conference in Vancouver.
When Plain wrote about the solo entrepreneur with the ugly website making west of dollars a year, his readers were in disbelief. At the time, AdSense was seen city a tool for amateurs. It might cover your blogging expenses, but it wouldn't make you rich.
